PHOENIX – Sometime during the interminable home third inning of Game 6 of the World Series, a white-haired man in a sportcoat and turtleneck stormed out of the BOB, climbed into a waiting limousine and roared off into the night.

“You should have seen the look on his face,” said a ballpark security guard named Sue, who had gotten a good look.

She mimicked the expression of a man suffering from severe constipation. “He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood,” she observed.

Well, George M. Steinbrenner III never did take losing very well, especially in the World Series, on national television, and in the luxury-suite festooned Fort Knox of a ballpark owned by his West Coast wannabe, Jerry Colangelo.

Steinbrenner had seen enough of the game and of these Yankees Saturday night. And his mood after the 15-2 Game 6 loss guarantees that you, too, have seen as much of them as you are ever going to see.

Regardless of the outcome of last night’s Game 7 showdown between Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, you will have a substantially different team to get to know next season.

Oh, the Yankees will be back, all right, and probably better than ever. Or, at least as long as George Steinbrenner is alive, good enough to make a run for it every October.

The system insures that the rich will always get richer, and Steinbrenner’s riches will ensure that his team will always be the richest. The Yankees will still be the Yankees. You may just have a hard time recognizing them.

Steinbrenner, of course, introduced the revolving-door clubhouse, which now has become as much a part of the game as creatine and Andro on the back shelf of all the lockers. But next year, a revolving door will not be sufficient to move the traffic that will flow into and out of The Bronx.

Through retirement, free agency or ineptitude, the Yankees are likely to shed themselves of a half-dozen players who made up a core of their team this season.

Say goodbye to Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez and Chuck Knoblauch and Scott Brosius and Orlando Hernandez and David Justice.

But don’t cry too hard for any of them, because before your hankies can dry, Steinbrenner will have filled their spots with younger, healthier, hungrier and better players.

Jeremy Giambi? Maybe. Nick Johnson? If he’s ready. Barry Bonds? If he can be bought. Who else is eligible to become a Yankee next year? Anyone who’s available, if Steinbrenner thinks he can help.

“I think it’s just the nature of the game anywhere with free agency and people coming through the minor leagues and the player development, that you feel that you have to make some changes,” Joe Torre said.

“We have lost significant people every year, probably not as many as we could potentially lose this year, but as many times as the manager would like to say, ‘Let’s try it with the same group,’ I think that’s an emotional statement.”

We always knew there was no crying in baseball. Nor, it seems, very much continuity.

For all the blather about how Torre’s Yankees are the greatest Yankee team in history, the truth is, the four championships won between 1996-2000 were won by four different teams.

The hero of the 1996 Series, John Wetteland, never closed another game for them after the World Series. Jim Leyritz, who hit the home run that turned around that Series, was soon gone, too.

David Wells, David Cone, Chili Davis, Wade Boggs, Cecil Fielder, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden all came, excelled – and left – over the past five years. Sometimes, it is tough to remember that they were ever here.

Only eight members of the 1996 Yankees are still around – Martinez, O’Neill, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Ramiro Mendoza, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams and Luis Sojo – and it is practically a sure bet that three of them (include Sojo in the goners) will not be back.

Even Torre, among the most sentimental of managers and men, recognizes that these days, a baseball team is no more a family than any other collection of transient workers who come together to do a job and then go their separate ways, sometimes never to work together again.

He was asked if he ever allows himself to gaze wistfully around his clubhouse at players he would probably manage for the final time last night.

“No, I don’t allow that to happen,” he said. “We are so focused on what we are trying to do that it’s tough to allow that to get into my mind. I am just trying to stay out of the way. I’m not having any meeting. I mean if I have to tell these players where we are and what’s at stake, then I have the wrong team in there.”

Torre knows he had the right team in there, no matter what happened in its final game together.

And unless Steinbrenner is suddenly cured of his addiction to winning, he will have the right team again next year.

The team is called the Yankees, and year after year, it remains the same.